


Oblivious Until Proven Stupid

by raendown



Series: MadaTobiWeek2018 [5]
Category: Naruto
Genre: M/M, just to help him get a clue, when you've gotta use the scientific method
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-02
Updated: 2018-08-02
Packaged: 2019-06-20 13:57:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15535764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raendown/pseuds/raendown
Summary: Tobirama's latest experiment wouldn't exactly pass any peer reviews. Not that he's showing these notes to anyone ever again.





	Oblivious Until Proven Stupid

If he hadn’t slept in and made himself late for a meeting then Izuna might never have known what was going on until it was all over and done with. Knowing that Mito-san was likely to paddle his ass over her knee if he wasn’t on time, no matter that he was a fully grown adult, his intention had been to hurl himself across the village at speeds so fast he would need his sharingan to keep from crashing in to anything. And it was having his sharingan active that allowed him to spot the tuft of fluffy white hair poking up over the apex of his neighbor’s tiled roof.

Tobirama didn’t even have the decency to look flustered when Izuna landed beside him with crossed arms and a raised eyebrow. He should have been considering the way his body was spread out across the downslope of the roof and the tips of his white fingers were all dyed different colors. From the way his hair stuck out at odd angles Izuna surmised that his best friend hadn’t gotten any sleep last night.

“You wanna tell me why you’re hiding out of sight and spying on my house?” he asked. Tobirama didn’t even look at him.

“I’m not spying on your house,” the man mumbled. “I’m spying on Madara’s house.”

“We life together, it’s the same thing you creep. Alright, I’ll bite anyway. Why are you spying on my brother?”

“Experiment.”

Izuna turned that over in his mind a few times. “Do I want to know?”

“Testing to see how long it will take him to realize that I’ve been flirting with him. Experiment phase one, ‘subtle flirtations’ got absolutely no response. Neither did phase two, ‘mild innuendo’ or phase three, ‘personal space invasions’.”

“You’re really turning your crush on my brother in to a science experiment?”

“Do you want updates on the results or not?”

“Oh no I definitely want updates. Can I offer a hypothesis? I don’t think he’s going to notice until you sit in his lap and make out with him or something.”

“Input noted.”

Shaking his head, Izuna turned around and scrubbed both hands down his face wearily. Nothing made him more tired than these two idiots and their lack of any social grace. Truly they deserved each other, if for no other reason than that he wouldn’t wish to inflict either of them on anyone else.

Before he took off to where he was supposed to be, he asked, “What exactly are you up to right now?”

“I drew a charcoal portrait of him and left it on his bedside table.” Tobirama paused with a thoughtful face. “Although I did draw the portrait of him screaming. It’s the most common expression he uses so it was the easiest to remember the details of.”

“Wow,” was all Izuna could say.

On the one hand, drawing a portrait took time which Tobirama quite often had precious little of. It was as intimate and romantic as someone like him was likely to get. But on the other hand his brother was probably going to take that more as an insult than a flirtation. Perfect.

He turned and leapt away then without another word, lest he learn something else and start laughing loud enough to blow Tobirama’s cover. At least now he would have a great excuse for being late and after she heard it Mito would not only forgive him, she would probably help him start up a betting pool. He comforted himself in the knowledge that he would be in good company when he finally lost his grip on the last tatters of his sanity.

Left behind, Tobirama had only to wait for another minute and a half before loud screaming and heated curses filled the air, much to his satisfaction. Clearly Madara had found his gift.

Not long after he was forced to flee the scene or risk the object of his affections capturing and strangling him. Tobirama retreated to his private labs to think about what had gone wrong with his gift and makes plans for how to proceed. He already had a notebook with several ideas jotted down, some more plausible than others and some already scrapped due to his surety that they would be taken with even less grace than his gift of a personalized portrait had been. It was still unclear whether Madara had objected to the placement of the gift, the subject of it, or the gift itself.

Any scientist worth their salt, however, was quite used to performing multiple experiments to achieve the desired results. Tobirama selected an idea from his notebook and neatly crossed it off the list before settling in to the chair at his work station to get started. What he had in mind was rather simple but still took time. Some of the steps took more than an hour to settle or to bubble away at high temperatures so he used those pauses to chip away at the paperwork he had brought home from the office.

By early evening he was trotting through the streets with a slim bottle rolling anxiously between his palms, eyes set dead ahead and ignoring anyone who happened to be in the way of where he wanted to go. He didn’t notice any of the people leaping out of his way nor the exasperated grumbling after he had passed by but even if he had he probably wouldn’t have cared much. The citizens of Konoha were well used to his idiosyncrasies by now.

Madara opened the door when he knocked but greeted him with a suspicious scowl.

“What?”

“I made this specifically for you,” Tobirama told him bluntly, thrusting the bottle forward in to the other man’s chest. Madara caught it reflexively and looked down to inspect it.

“The hell is it?”

“A conditioner for your hair so you can finally brush it.”

Madara’s face turned red instantly. “Are you implying that I do not brush my hair? Fuck you, Senju, I brush my hair! It’s just wiry and difficult and it gets big with the humidity and – I don’t have to explain my grooming habits to you! My hair is none of your business!”

“Interesting.” Tobirama tilted his head to one side, examining the other man’s scrunched expression. “Would you say you’re more angry at the fact that I’ve given you something or at the perceived insult to your hair?”

“Stop going on about my hair, damn it!”

“Hm. Very interesting. Alright.”

Not waiting to be asked to leave, Tobirama turned and walked away to head home once more. Behind him he could hear Madara spluttering but ignored it in favor of making a mental note that the act of gift giving did not seem to be the problem in either instance.

He didn’t get a lot of sleep that night. Despite going to bed at a reasonable hour for once he was kept up by thoughts of his current experiment and hoping Izuna’s prediction didn’t become a necessity. He was prepared to do it if things came down to that but Tobirama would prefer to have more dignity than to throw himself across Madara’s lap and bluntly invite him home for something decidedly less innocent than a cup of coffee.

After a few fitful hours of very unsatisfying sleep Tobirama woke in the morning with red-rimmed eyes and a head full of ideas his brother would probably disapprove of. Luckily he had no intention of discussing them with Hashirama. The moment he arrived at the tower he buried himself in the paperwork waiting for him, hurrying through as much as he possibly could to free up some time after lunch, and entirely ignored all of the people drifting in and out trying to get his attention. One of them might have been Hiruzen with some sort of jutsu question and another might have Mito with paperwork of some kind but his attention stayed focused entirely on the task of completing his current work. His head stayed bowed over the desk and didn’t move until the stack in his ‘to be completed’ tray was shorter than the one in his ‘to be filed’ tray.

Then he cracked his neck, rolled his shoulders, and spotted the plate of muffins someone had thoughtfully left almost right under his nose. One of them he popped in to his mouth and another he snatched up to bring with him as he rose from the desk.

His first stop was the poke his head in to Izuna’s office and stare at him expectantly without saying anything. Izuna stared back with an irritated expression, capitulating to his silent demands rather quicker than he usually would.

“Just don’t tell him that I told you where he is okay? He’s overseeing the security teams laying the new barriers. But you didn’t hear that from me!” He yelled the last part as Tobirama disappeared, already trotting away to his new destination with little care for whether or not he brought someone else down with him in this mad quest.

Sometimes Tobirama really wished he could pinpoint the moment he had fallen in love with Madara so he could go back in time and thwap himself around the head for such an outrageous decision. Clearly he’d gone round the bend. On the other hand there was a lovely opportunity freely available in the fact that Madara obviously hadn’t admitted to himself yet that he shared those feelings, giving Tobirama the chance for a most unique experiment: to see how obvious he could be until Madara finally came to his senses.

What he hadn’t expected, however, was that Madara would be quite this oblivious. Even more unexpected was his own impatience concerning the whole thing, Always before he had been able to maintain his composure and take as many steps in his experiments as was necessary to achieve results, good or bad, but now he found himself wishing Madara would just _get it already_ every time they spoke. It was incredibly frustrating.

At the very least he had a plan of action. Today he would make one more overture in the “gift giving” phase before moving on to his final experiment, which he hoped would be obvious enough while still retaining at least a modicum of his dignity.

He found Madara right where his brother had said he would be, in the security hut beneath the eastern wall of the village, standing with his arms crossed and his brows furrowed in concentration. Several men and women from various clans scrambled around him laying the seal work for the new barrier they would be casting over the village, one which Tobirama himself had helped design and would be much easier to maintain than the old one.

Madara didn’t appear to notice him entering through the open door until he had already gotten quite close. His target turned to look at him with a wrinkled nose.

“What do you want now?” he demanded. Tobirama fished around in his pocket and quickly shoved his gift in to the other man’s chest.

“This is for you.”

Madara grunted and took the item without thinking, making Tobirama wonder if he expected it to be work related. Then he looked down at the storage scroll, turning it over to inspect in from all sides like it might offer some clues about its contents. With a wary frown he unrolled it across one palm and waved away the smoke when the seal reversed, leaving him holding a long thin wooden box. Unlatching it revealed an extremely expensive calligraphy set.

When his frown only deepened even further in to a full blown scowl Tobirama knew the man had taken something the wrong way again, although he couldn’t imagine what. It was only a personalized calligraphy set.

“Senju, what the hell is this?”

“A gift?”

“This is an insult! It’s got _your_ family crest on it! This is blatant erasure!”

Shaking his head and backing up out of range of the suddenly flailing limbs, Tobirama sighed disappointedly. He’d thought marking the brushes with his own clan symbol would be an obvious sign that he would like for them to merge their families together, not that he wanted to erase Madara’s clan somehow.  Why did he have to fall in love with such an obstinate man so ready to take offense?

He ducked when the calligraphy set came flying at his head and calmly watched Madara stalk off in the opposite direction. As he had suspected, the final experiment in the “gift giving” phase was as unsuccessful as the others. It was time for the ultimate phase of his experiment.

As anxious as he was to see the final results, however, he knew better than to try anything further while Madara was still in high dudgeon and so his next efforts were put off for a few days until his intended stopped glaring at him whenever they passed each other in the hallway. He knew he was waiting for Madara to forget about the whole thing rather than waiting for forgiveness but it worked just as well for his goal. Besides, Tobirama had never minded a good round of bickering so long as there weren’t any real bad feelings behind it. He actually enjoyed the times Madara picked a fight with him and managed not to turn it all in to a big production.

Finally the two of them saw each other in a meeting of the Hokage’s council where it seemed everything had cooled off at last, prompting Tobirama to rub his hands together under the table. It was time to begin the final round of tests in his experiment.

Keeping his eyes on Madara for the entirety of the meeting wasn’t exactly a hardship considering how visually appealing his target was. It did raise a bit of suspicion in the room as others slowly noticed where his attention lay but Tobirama was more than used to ignoring what other people thought of him so the curious murmuring hardly bothered him. He was busy waiting for Madara to meet his eyes so that he could tilt his head to one side, blink very slowly, and hope that he was achieving the bedroom eyes look he’d heard Mito talking about once.

He didn’t precisely know what bedroom eyes were supposed to look like but he gave it his best shot anyway.

After the meeting he headed off any chance of escape by following Madara in to the man’s office and standing over the desk with arms crossed until he was acknowledged.

“What. Do. You. Want?”

“Come to lunch with me.”

“I’ve already had lunch. It’s three in the afternoon, you lunatic.”

“Then come to lunch with me tomorrow.”

“Why on earth would I do that?”

Before he had a chance to respond there was a knock at the door and the Inuzuka clan head popped his head in to the office with a few follow-up questions about the discussions which had just concluded. Tobirama left in a sulk and threw himself in to his own office, carefully recording the results of his efforts in the notebooks he had taken to carrying around before getting back to work.

Another couple of days went by, days in which Tobirama dragged Izuna out for lunch instead and showed him the notebook. He didn’t appreciate the laughter but consoled himself with believing that Izuna was only laughing at his own brother’s obliviousness. There was nothing funny about using the scientific method to solve an everyday problem; that was how he’d improved the plumbing systems for the village and how he’d come up with the proper seals to hide Hashirama’s cookies from him so it should be good enough to figure out how to finally open Madara’s eyes.

Other than laughing at him Izuna did have another good suggestion to offer. Tobirama had previously been unaware that dinner was considered a more romantic meal than lunch – he was still unsure on the specifics of why and very much intended to look in to that – but now that he knew he couldn’t wait to put this information to use. He left Izuna with half a tray of dango and an almost empty pot of tea, forgetting in his excitement that he had promised to treat that time.

Madara eyed him warily when he found the man a couple streets away from the newly built academy. Tobirama cornered him up against the closest wall and cleared his throat, determined not to be misinterpreted this time. His experiment had seemed like such a fun idea when he first came up with it but he hadn’t taken in to account the variable of his own rising frustrations, both physical and emotional.

“I would like you to join me for dinner,” he said, clear and concise just as Izuna had advised.

“What for this time?”

“There is something I would like to discuss with you.” Dinner would be the perfect opportunity to hammer his point home if he could only get the man there. Romantic candles, a home cooked meal by the riverside, he’d gotten more than a few good ideas from watching Hashirama over the years.

Yet it seemed this trial had been a failure as well, going by the roll of Madara’s eyes.

“Look, just come by my office later and we can talk there, alright? There’s no need to give anyone the wrong idea by going out to dinner just to talk business. Hmph.” Madara glared one more time before shuffling around Tobirama’s frozen form and continuing on his way to wherever he’d been headed before being accosted.

Tobirama stood staring at the wall for a long time. How was it possible for someone to come to the right conclusion _and_ the wrong conclusion at the same time? It didn’t seem possible that there was really a person walking around his village who possessed the sheer amount of obtuseness to do that and yet he’d witnessed the whole thing with his own two eyes.

He stood there until a passing citizen grew concerned and asked if he was okay, hurrying away before they could ask any embarrassing questions about what the hell he was doing. It was time to end this. Patience be damned, scientific curiosity be damned, Tobirama had reached the end of his rope. A moment of concentration told him that Madara had made it back to the Administration Tower so that was where he headed, taking the man’s advice after all. If Madara wanted them to speak in his office about this then that was what they were going to do.

When he tried the door it was locked but that was hardly a tough obstacle for any shinobi worth their salt. Tobirama had the lock picked in under half a minute, swinging the door open and bulldozing his way passed the loud complaints which Madara began shouting immediately.

“Do you have no sense of privacy Senju? A locked door means fuck off, I’m busy!”

“You told me we could discuss this in your office,” Tobirama reminded him, marching towards the desk.

“I didn’t mean now! What the hell are you doing!?”

As it turned out, Izuna’s hypothesis had been the correct one. It took sitting directly in his lap and pulling him in to a kiss with both hands cupping his face for Madara to finally understand what Tobirama had been trying to get at for multiple weeks now. Several seconds passed in tense silence before Madara hummed low in his throat and wound his arms around Tobirama’s waist, pulling him in closer. Fingers tangled in to hair and clung to loose clothing as the two of them ravaged each other, bodies pressing as close together as they possibly could in their slightly awkward position.

Tobirama released all of his pent up frustration in to the kiss, licking and biting as he saw fit, and all Madara did was groan and take what he was given. He could hardly believe that it had been both so difficult and taken so much useless effort just to get here.

“This is why you’ve been so touchy-feely lately,” Madara breathed between kisses. Tobirama snorted.

“Mhm.”

“And why you keep giving me things.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Probably why you kept asking me out for meals too.”

“Uchiha,” Tobirama growled, changing trajectory to nip and the man’s ear. “Shut up and kiss me. I’ve waited long enough for you to get this through your thick skull and I _deserve_ a reward for my patience.”

Madara chuckled darkly underneath him. “Oh I’ll give you a reward.”

One of his hands snuck in between their bodies and Tobirama very quickly lost track of the open door, the possibility that someone might see them, even the world itself in general. All he cared about was the high of another successful experiment and chasing the thrill of his promised compensation.

He really hoped no one ever read the log of this particular experiment phase, though, because just writing out these results was going to be awkward enough.


End file.
